Much recent scholarship has foregrounded the kinship of humans and nonhumans. Animal studies have dominated writing about the natural world and drawn attention to the cohabitation, co-development, and companionship of sentient organisms. A new concern with plants complements animal studies by recounting the relationships and similarities of humans to all living beings. Regarding plants as living beings with inner lives, with capacities of movement and sensibility, offers an expanded sense of the coexistence of humans and plants.

Sophie Ruppel makes a compelling case that the turn of the nineteenth century was a key historical moment for fostering a fascination with plant life and a sense of kinship between humans and plants. The expansive scope of her book covers developments in the knowledge of plants, in the practices of botanizing, and in bringing plants into domestic spaces between 1750 and 1850. She argues that the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a rejection of the stark contrast René Descartes posited between the mechanisms of the physical world and the human soul to allow for broader understandings of the interiority of living beings. In the case of plants, this new sense of interiority and even claims for plant souls was developed in the context of new studies of the electrification and revivification of plants, of plant sexual reproduction and the generation of living plants from organic matter, of the sleep of plants, of plant movement, and of plant irritability and sensibility. Ruppel highlights arguments for the homologies of plants, animals, and humans, not in the later nineteenth-century sense of purported evolutionary relationships but in the sense of the recognition of corresponding characteristics between different sorts of living beings.

Ruppel draws the reader into the developing fascination with botanizing in the years around 1800. Botanizing as a practice involved a deep knowledge and a love of plants. It was also an educational and social practice that was embraced across classes and social groups. Before the establishment of botany as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century, botanizing was a popular pursuit in the countryside and in urban settings. Botanists might be pharmacists, physicians, ministers, bureaucrats, merchants, soldiers, teachers, as well as scholars. Women also participated in botanizing, as gentlewomen or through working marriages. Ruppel traces the range of publications communicating botanical knowledge and encouraging the practices of botanizing—from botanical journals, through handbooks and reference guides, to regional floras and popular magazines. She also highlights the role of the herbarium as contributing to the spread of knowledge of plants across time and space. She presents botanizing and publishing on plants as collective activities, as part of shared passions and the collaborative sharing of knowledge.

Ruppel also highlights how plants became routine aspects of everyday practices and households. She offers a loose connection between household plants and the history of gardening for both practical and aesthetic purposes. But her focus is on the developing fashions for plants in the home and the advice on care of household plants. Ruppel offers an interesting account of the connections between advancements in the science of air and the emerging household plant culture. She recounts Joseph Priestley's and Jan Ingenhousz's experiments in the 1770s and 1780s on the role of plants in the exchange of different kinds of air and their contributions to an understanding of photosynthesis. Ingenhousz argued that at night or in the dark plants no longer purify air or produce breathable air but instead give off a foul or poisonous air. His claim led to debates about the benefits of plants within households. Ruppel relates how these disputes were resolved after the turn of the century and how plants within the home came to be regarded as a health benefit and a growing fashion. She traces the developing passion for flowering plants, the growing number of publications on the care of household plants, and the market for house plants and flowers.

The Enlightenment operates in Ruppel's work more as a set of ideas and ideals across the period of Ruppel's study than as a historical period. She repeatedly emphasizes how the idea of a chain of being drew attention to the similarities and relationships between plants, animals, and humans. She also emphasizes how physicotheological ideas underscored the study of plants as religious and moral endeavors that led to respect for and praise of the power and wisdom of the creator. The pursuit of knowledge and edification was meant to exercise the mind, the heart, and the body. In her book, the Enlightenment is presented as valuing knowledge of nature as a part of human development and characterized as a broad civic and public movement. The development of botanical knowledge and botanizing practices reflected and contributed to these social ideals. Ruppel contrasts the open character of Enlightenment and civic concerns with plants to the closed professionalization of botany and commercialization of plants in the mid-nineteenth century. These contrasts seem too stark and the Enlightened-civic study of plants too idealized. It would be interesting to learn more about how historical shifts unfolded, and how the understanding of plants and practices of botanizing gradually changed from the historical period of the Enlightenment through the Romantic period and into the nineteenth century.

Ruppel presents the diverse ways of knowing plants, of the practices of botanizing, and of everyday relationships to plants in an episodic manner. This reader would have welcomed more integration between the different parts of her study. But Botanophilie provides a wonderful sampling of the relationships between plants and human beings in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century.